“The Mediterranean dream is inseparable from the civilisation of progress, of which the Mediterranean is the most precious treasure.”
I remember, when I was a child, how easily we travelled from one shore to the other, without visas, without prohibitions, almost without control. It was a blessed time of trust. Terrorism did not exist. The plane stopped very close to the small balcony adorned with geraniums that looked directly onto the runways of Tunis airport. There was something euphoric in the infinite freedom of movement, as if all races were really one and equality had conquered them all naturally. Indistinct Humanity danced in a circle on the waves.
It was the day after the independence processes. The Mediterranean was the allegory that colonialism had been defeated, racism eradicated, dominated peoples liberated, and enmities forgotten. It carried this aspiration for emancipation, for the recognition of all conditions; it was a metaphor for human fraternity beyond political disagreements, the tempting idea that there were no longer barriers or differences between people, whatever the colour of their skin. It was this dazzling myth of the end of the injustice of the powerful towards the weak.
Behind this historical milestone was the message of Progress, around which a perfect consensus had formed. The Mediterranean dream is inseparable from the civilisation of progress, of which the Mediterranean is the most precious treasure. The two shores were animated by the same frenzy of development, of exchanges, of cooperation, of mutual aid. But this moment of friendship between the peoples did not last.
“It was the day after the independence processes.
The Mediterranean was the allegory that colonialism had been defeated, racism eradicated,
dominated peoples liberated, and enmities forgotten.»
Why is it that Progress, that rejected child of 15th-century Renaissance, has not taken root on the southern shore, and has not continued its momentum in the same direction as in Europe? No bright fire has been lit on this shore in the direction of modernity, as was expected. The southern shore has not found the key to its revival by wanting to attain the benefits of modern culture. It has not succeeded. It has remained on the sidelines. It has not taken over from the northern shore, or perhaps the latter has been incapable of transmitting its instruction manual correctly.
Gradually, the southern shore began to accumulate failures, to measure its impotence, its deficiencies, its despair. Meanwhile, the northern shore continued its march in all areas. The decolonised did not manage to liberate the creative aspirations of their society. Serious obstacles emerged. Progress left its fortunate path. It did not keep its promise of peace, reconciliation, optimism for the future. The iridescent bubble of civilisation that we had imagined vanished. The Mediterranean marriage quickly fell apart. The banquet was put away. The guests dispersed.
In world culture, the southern Mediterraneans have remained as uncertain, marginal, ambivalent associates in their relationship with modernity. The secrets of progress have remained closed off to them. They have missed the train of civilisation. The southern shore has fallen into unforeseen political, social and cultural regressions, sunk into bureaucracies of control and oppression of its populations, which have spread a uniform, sterile and immobile culture. Nationalist currents, breaking with colonial tutelage, have enslaved their peoples instead of emancipating them, under a power no less oppressive than that of the colonising forces. Fanatical, xenophobic, hyper-nationalist, obscurantist political currents have trapped society, aggravated by authoritarian, bureaucratic, military or police powers. The southern Mediterranean, despite the numerous insignia of its sovereignty, flag, state, army, and so on, has found itself a prisoner of new servitudes and an inferiority that it had not foreseen.
However, despite the regression that strikes these regions, to the point that they experience uncontrollable waves of exodus, and not only for material reasons, Mediterranean hope still acts on both shores as a cultural force that would put an end to the conflicts that beset it. The Mediterranean idea is animated by an everlasting desire for rebirth, as if the image of its former splendour ignored current realities, as if it carried within itself its own overcoming.
But we must ask ourselves about the scope of this cultural idealism, and examine the reality of its relevance in the future of the region and its influence on the world. Because what was presented as the cradle of humanism is today constantly belied by the facts. It is even clear that the increase in conflicts in the Mediterranean in the foreground of the international scene is increasingly distancing it from the humanist perspective, and instead bringing it closer to an advance of everything that is inhuman.
It is certainly in the Mediterranean where terrible confrontations struggle against each other today, which bring to their maximum point the instincts of hegemony and power capable of becoming weapons of mass destruction, as illustrated by the secular war inflicted by the Jews and the Arabs, both eminently Mediterranean but each boasting a sacred identity due to possessing the same land.
Who could have foreseen that the famous phrase uttered by Cato “Carthago delenda est“, the starting point of the Punic Wars that devastated Carthage, would find its terrible echo in the 21st century in the devastation of Gaza delenda est? It is hard to see how Mediterranean hope will recover from this devastation.
When we look at the Mediterranean landscape in its beauties, its variegated flora crossed by wastelands, while the sun quivers like an unreal violin, we wonder how this mirror of paradise saw the deluge of hell that unfolds before our eyes born in the midst of its imperfections. The Mediterranean has not been at the level of its miraculous nature. So much beauty from nature, so much ugliness from humans! The creative genius of the Mediterranean frequents its destructive demon. The blessed shores of the gods are the cursed shores of men. It is in the Mediterranean where the happiness of existence can be most intense, but where the misfortune of killing reaches intolerable limits. Are the Mediterraneans of today condemned to connect only by the fatality of misfortune, by the experience of their cruel fraternity? Do they still carry within them the breath of their ancient creativity?
However, we continue to speak, as if to ward off the violence of conflicts, of the “dialogue of cultures”, a formula that returns as a leitmotif in a rhetoric that is a little too easy, a cliché that in reality hides numerous torments. Indeed, culture can produce identity ghosts that have nothing to do with literate humanism as conveyed to us by the world of art and philosophy. Cultural identity is not always the right conversation between people who are already predisposed to listen to each other, to understand each other and to recognise each other, as happens in the privileged exchange to which we have been invited in Barcelona. The humanist is not afraid to mix with “the plurality of worlds”, according to the excellent 18th-century book by Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle. Humanism is the vocation of otherness and not the pride of its origins.
But the cultural identity of radicalism as it develops in the Mediterranean is not this fertile prism that has been bequeathed to us. It is alien to this classical humanist transmission, which it ignores anyway. Rather, it reveals the cult of its “origin”, of an exacerbated image of oneself that is nothing but an unacknowledged expression of a need for power and domination.
The idea that culture is in itself, by its very nature, a virtuous faculty, an innate reason for peace and progress, is inaccurate. Culture also contains dark passions that reveal completely opposite dispositions. It is in the name of its cultural identity that irresponsible, bellicose and even criminal actions are very often perpetuated. It is in the name of one’s own culture, through delirious narcissism, that a person can become a terrorist. Cultural awareness often conceals dishonourable motives of hostility and domination.
Thus, the issue of cultural harmony, of a Mediterranean dialogue of cultures, is a rhetorical trap that conceals power relations that no dialogue can resolve without examining its political motives. The hope that Mediterranean culture alone is a means to transcend the ideological violence of radicalisms is illusory, because these radicalisms have become the result of culture itself and have an immense influence on the indigent masses.
There is therefore a mismatch between the idea we have of the Mediterranean, as an idyllic region, nourished by legends, poetry, aesthetics and architecture, and the historical scene of its conflicts, its Guernicas, its fratricidal wars, its political storms that have shaken it throughout modern times. The current picture of the Mediterranean is at the antipodes of the treasures of art, of the world of beauty. It is rather a landscape of desolation, of ruins, of hunger, of exodus caused by violent passions where the values of Mediterranean humanism, as bequeathed to us by Antiquity, seem to be on the verge of vanishing.
This dichotomy creates in us a confusion, an intellectual turmoil that prevents us from combining the two terms of this paradox; on the one hand, the genius of creation, on the other, the demon of destruction. The Mediterranean is going through the darkest hours of its history, which are taking it further away every day from the parable of human reconciliation that it embodied in the 1960s, just after the independence processes.
The Mediterranean as conceived by our human ideal escapes us, even if we ourselves are Mediterranean. Perhaps in fact because we are. And because we seek with all our might to make our humanist approach more operational, stronger, more active. We would like to see the Mediterranean through the eyes of humanism, but we do not succeed. It no longer responds to the analysis of our reason; it escapes our need for clarity. Our intellectual life is not enough to understand it. The Mediterranean, as we imagine it or want it, no longer meets our expectations. Can Mediterranean humanism, the symbol in our eyes of the parable of human reconciliation, act on the forces that are now supposedly irreconcilable? Can the world of art and thought still find its place in a current situation that denies it? Does it still have a role to play? Is it not anachronistic, obsolete, antiquated, inoperative? Does it still have a meaning? Does a Mediterranean inspiration still exist?
It is therefore with lucid eyes, free from a certain Mediterranean idealism, that we must ask ourselves without lying whether the Mediterranean question is still possible, plausible, whether it is not exhausted, whether it still has the power of attraction. In short, whether the Mediterranean Sea always embodies this fluid passage between two worlds, this crossroads of cultures, this multiple communication, this symbolic plurality, this attraction of otherness that has made it synonymous with civilisation. In short, it is a question of knowing whether the Mediterranean continues to embody civilisation or whether it is nothing more than a formal vestige, outdated, which already serves more as a consolation than as a promise of the future.
Let us examine here a key theme of Mediterranean humanism: travel. Travel associates the Mediterranean with the feeling of diversion, freedom, discovery, fascination. We know from books and from experience that humanism was born from its inhabitants’ desire to travel, this deployment of diverse horizons between East and West, between South and North. Humanist philosophy is inconceivable without this call to travel, a favourite theme of writers from the Renaissance to the present day. Travel here is not simple leisure, it is not a tourist distraction, it is an intellectual adventure, a passion for exploration, a search for the new, a yearning for truth, a reading of the variations of the human condition under other latitudes. This is how the Mediterranean has become, through the pen of its great writers, the kaleidoscope in which the original figures of the East and West are exalted and appreciated. Hence, the essence of the Mediterranean heritage cannot be conceived without the principle of movement, of adventure, of hospitality turned towards the civilisation of the world and the poetry of its infinite variety. But is it still so?
“The Mediterranean, myth of poetic odysseys,
has become an impassable border,
similar to the little drawing of the Lebanese child
that represents the sea through a wall.»
Today, there is a glaring paradox between the issue of the abolition of borders, as a principle of universal mobility, and the obstacles suffered by the inhabitants of the southern shore, for whom the desire to travel or simply the attempt to do so is now treated as a crime. From the northern shore, these people are not seen as travellers, but as immigrants. The change of words is eloquent. Because it means that we have already left humanist philosophy. Or we would have to admit that there are only humanists from a single shore, which is impossible, precisely in view of humanist ethics. If the Mediterranean principle is one that gives everyone an equal right of access to the world, how can we accept that some enjoy this right and others are deprived of it?
The Mediterranean condition suffers here the denial of its intimate truth; that is, the universal aspiration of humans to circulate, to move, to go wherever they want, according to their innate needs for discovery, for novelty, for the unknown, for encounter. Here, the Mediterranean of immigration acts against the Mediterranean of travel. One is human, the other is inhuman. How can the northern shore make its own an individualistic morality of freedom, and take away from those on the opposite shore the right to enjoy it as it does?[1]
The Mediterranean, myth of poetic odysseys, has become an impassable border, similar to the little drawing of the Lebanese child that represents the sea through a wall. The Berlin Wall fell, but the Iron Curtain has moved to the Mediterranean. From a parable of human reconciliation, it has become a wall of prohibition. The circular dance of the waves has been transformed into a danse macabre of desperate human crowds on the piers that project onto our screens as many rafts of the Medusa as shipwrecks, offering the world the despair of their tormented bodies. The luminous sea has retreated to let the dark banks of the river of hell advance.
We can say here that the Mediterranean, which embodied the image of universality, is the place where the universal fails, the impossibility of the human condition to enjoy on equal terms the human rights to travel the world. To those humans, the world is forbidden. The Mediterranean, this land of legends and of the one thousand and one nights, is where the despair of a humanity proscribed from the spectacle of the world, of a humanity that will no longer have the right to enjoy the world, is the most outrageous and the most unjust. And the world looks at it with total indifference, which preludes the loss of the Mediterranean’s human vocation, the end of Mediterranean humanism. A culture whose principle had been overcoming racism, searching for otherness, is now gripped by fears and rejections in which the human race appears more than ever to be its own enemy.
“The Berlin Wall fell, but the Iron Curtain
has moved to the Mediterranean. From a parable
of human reconciliation, it has become a wall of prohibition.”
Despite their geographical proximity, and the similarity of their natural maritime beauty, North and South are distanced from each other because of history. Their similarity is deceptive. Geography is refuted by a history that has not ceased to oppose them, to separate them, to tear them apart, making them increasingly unknown because of their beliefs, their traditions, their customs and above all their states of development and wealth.
In a Mediterranean where a society of abundance and prosperity and another of deprivation and misery are regarded with contempt, passions become irreconcilable. See, for example, the recent episode of the disagreement between France and Algeria, in which hostility culminated in the persecution of a writer, Boualem Sansal. Algerian culture and French culture have awakened the old demons of colonisation. This sad episode makes it clear that literature and art have been sacrificed to a sectarian vision of culture, to the primitive angers of enemy identities, to an ideological struggle in which games of rivalry and domination have taken hostage the person of a peaceful humanist with loving eyes. This is a good example of Mediterranean antagonism, where, far from building common understanding, a limited cultural and national awareness becomes clear.
“The Mediterranean question becomes a lesser evil of political lies,
when it leads people to believe that culture can, by its own strength,
make up for the failure of progress.”
Behind Mediterranean culture as a paradigm of peace and reconciliation looms the shadow of colonial memory, which we had thought had been overcome. The idea of a Mediterranean culture separated from the political question, which would illustrate the parable of reconciliation of humanity, remains a chimera. The culture of the North offers the image of a well-kept, orderly country, an environment of well-being and security, while the other side, in contrast, is struck by a calamity of poverty and disorder, of neglect and frustrations that feed resentment and greed. In return, reflexes of fear and rejection develop on the part of the most powerful, and the awakening of racial prejudices that cultural dialogue had supposedly overcome.
For decades, the South and the North have maintained the deceptive illusion of an official state discourse according to which culture would build its egalitarian magic, its beneficial dialogue. But the reality is that the scientific, industrial, technological and economic feats of the North have shattered the Mediterranean of the South. The disproportion of progress between the two shores has prevented any kind of cultural harmony within overly unequal couples. The Mediterranean question becomes a lesser evil of political lies, when it leads people to believe that culture can, by its own strength, make up for the failure of progress. Culture becomes the smokescreen for progress that, actually, is never achieved.
But a greater difficulty with the Mediterranean paradigm emerges when we address the question of democracy. The political systems of the North and the South are so opposite − in the North, societies of rights and opulent parliamentary democracies, in the South, impoverished autocracies rooted in the lack of a culture of freedom − that this obvious contrast is probably where the Mediterranean idea falls apart, disintegrates even further. The two shores look at each other, with an unhealthy obsession, accentuated by a deceptive diplomacy between open societies and closed societies, states of wealth and states of poverty, levels of knowledge and levels of ignorance that make the failure of real political emancipation on the southern shore obvious.
How can a true policy of alliance between liberal and despotic states be organised? The question of democracy throws up insurmountable problems between North and South and revives spectres of interference and stealthy domination. Until the southern shore manages to respond properly to the free aspirations of its own inhabitants and to create the conditions of well-being that bind people to their country and deter them from leaving en masse abroad to escape oppression and misery, the idea of a true cultural alliance will be a chimera. The inability to govern oneself democratically gives rise to ideological rivalries designed to mask this deficiency. The authoritarian drift of these societies, which live in mimicry of modernity without a liberal basis, is undoubtedly due to a misuse of their own culture, which has failed to become anything more than a xenophobic chauvinism. The cultural alibi is the best weapon that states have found to justify, using the argument of identity, their abuses of power and their reactionary ideas. On the other hand, the North seems to want to take advantage of its supremacy and an imperial position of democracy with respect to its former subjects, perceived as diplomatic interference. The Mediterranean ceremonial emerges as an artificial celebration, a kind of cultural appearance, a simulacrum of dialogue full of misunderstandings, unspoken words and ulterior motives. Thus, after colonisation, the Mediterranean question has often allowed for the fabrication of a fictitious and hypocritical understanding between the North and the South. The two worlds have become true allies forever. True fraternity has not happened.
Added to this political misunderstanding, as if to alleviate a deficiency, is a rise of the issue of religion through the most visible manifestation of Islam. Mediterranean culture is here besieged by the spectre of new religious wars. The relationship becomes even more difficult between cultures that have completed their secular mutation and those that have not. This resurgence seems at first glance an almost insurmountable challenge.
Undoubtedly, the memory of Antiquity will not have been strong enough, alive enough, for the North and the South to recognise a common destiny. Ancient memory is born from the archaeology of the wise, but not from a lived common awareness. Should we see in the loss of ancient culture the cause of the rise of religion, the decline of profane values in favour of religious values? This is not at all easy to answer. This is where the Mediterranean finds its existential dilemma: can there be conciliation today between secular values and religious values, between the profane and the sacred?
In fact, we may be at a moment of reversal in the course of history. Indeed, democratic freedoms were born in Europe after the decline of religion and the disappearance of the power of the Church with the regression of the imprint of faith on our consciences. However, the southern shore is seeing how, instead, there are increasingly new religious forces that assert their right to be recognised democratically, which had entailed their fierce repression by the nation states. In other words, religion is reborn from the very advance of freedoms in European modernity. Thus, an unexpected phenomenon, the Muslim religion is advancing its own dynamics of progress, instead of regressing as had been the case with Christianity in the West over the last centuries.
The question now is to know what, in the recrudescence of religion, is born of obscurantism and what is an authentic claim for freedom. It is a question of examining whether Muslim culture, freed from its superstitious dogmas, can participate in a new Mediterranean humanism. Here the Mediterranean becomes the central stage where the relationship between freedom of conscience born of modern disbelief and the return of faith to the political scene will be played out. Because if we stick to the idea that only Westerners have the capacity to be free, we are not carrying out a true humanist’s work. Humanism consists of finding in otherness the same dispositions, the same universal human aspirations, to freedom as its own. Freedom can take different paths, different directions that are no less culturally valid. If we close ourselves in a single model of freedom, we somehow lose our own freedom.
We must consider the hypothesis that Muslim dissent is perhaps not only the return of obscurantism, but also the path towards its own freedom. This promising evolution took place in Tunisia after 2011, when the Islamic-leaning Nahdha party transformed itself into a Muslim democratic party, placing public freedoms and human rights at the centre of its political governance.[2] The religious question became the central issue of Mediterranean consciousness. Reason must address it by stripping it of its ideological prejudices. The challenge lies in the capacity of countries led by totalitarian regimes to change the nature of their institutions by liberalising them, and in the people’s will to overthrow their autocratic traditions through revolution, as was the case in Tunisia in 2011. Thus, beyond the question of material progress, we must ask about the ideological foundation that sustains it, that of the culture of freedom as a moral principle. If Mediterranean humanism must undertake a task in the contemporary debate, it is to confront the urgent problem of the path from oppression to freedom.
[1] The famous Helsinki Conference of 1977, which established the principle of the “free movement of goods and people” between East and West during the Cold War, has not been repeated between North and South. Rather, it has been ignored.
[2] The 25 July 2021 coup d’état put an end, through a brutal return to dictatorship, to this original experience of citizen coexistence between conservative and progressives.